When you make payment transfers to recipients outside of Austria and specially commissioned urgent transfers, the data contained in the transfer is forwarded to the payee's bank via the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) , which is headquartered in Belgium. At this time, there is no other company that offers these services on a worldwide basis, which means that Austrian financial institutions regularly have no alternative to the services of SWIFT for the processing of international payment transactions. Without working together with SWIFT, an Austrian bank would not be able to offer its customers any worldwide payment transaction services. The SWIFT network that is used by Austrian financial institutions fulfils the strictest technical security requirements.
For reasons of system security, SWIFT temporarily saves all transaction data in its computer centres in the Netherlands and the USA.

As a result, SWIFT may be required to disclose information that it has saved in the USA to US authorities for the purposes of fighting international terrorism.

We are providing you with this information in response to a request from the Austrian data protection authorities with regard to the current legal situation.